Fate is the Hunter

In 2013 the travelling public and indeed aspiring young pilots expect to arrive safely at the end of each and every journey. However, few know of the pyramid of souls on which this expectation is built. Earnest Gann masterfully acqaints us with some of them, his colleagues. Their world was one of adventure, enterprise, experimentation and often, a sudden and violent death. I applaud you.

I simply admire these early day airline pilots. What an incredible adventure these men had as pioneers of aviation. Written very well too from a literary perspective, I am going to have to read this story again, starting now.

I have read the book many years ago, and more than once. Gann can tell a story, and his paintings of his pilot colleagues and other figures including himself are deligtfully alive. What comes first to my mind is his description of Keim, a Captain who smoked cigars which were especially nauseating in the narrow cockpit, and whose pleasure in smoking doubled having found out that Gann hates it. As i read the book a quater of a century ago, my remembering of such detail says a lot about the book. Gann is able to bring you over anything- the finesse of the emotional atmosphere, dramatic events in the air and even technical detail without making the story dry. Gann's memories of his airline days are a beautiful literature by any standards and, very possibly, they make the best book about aviation ever written. To top it all - this is the authors qualified testimony about the heroic days from the perilous beginnings of the history of air transportation. I have read a couple of Gann's other titles after this one, but cannot say I can still remember what they were about, except that they were fiction. The fate hunting down his friends, one by one, and never revealing her next - this is the story sitting in the authors chest, the story he had to tell, the story of his life. His novels obviously could not share the urgency of a compelling real life this book presents so vividly.